Between Innocence and Rebellion: Nara’s Sonic Soul Reverberates at Southbank Centre

Visiting Yoshitomo Nara: One Foot in the Groove at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, felt like stepping into the artist’s psyche—where music, memory, emotion, and a childlike defiance converge in powerful visual form.

The Exhibition & Its Impact

This is Nara’s first solo show at a UK public institution - the largest European retrospective to date, featuring over 150 works across drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, print‐making, and installation, spanning four decades of his career. Theme‐based curation invites you to journey through motifs of resistance, home, solitude, peace, and punk culture, rather than a chronological biography.

A Story Rooted in Music and Solitude

Born in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, Nara spent his childhood alone, tuning into the Far East Network radio, absorbing anti-authority folk and punk anthems even without understanding the words. Those sounds shaped his earliest visual sensibility. His time studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany refined his expressionistic style into the now-iconic wide-eyed children with defiant postures, characters that Nara sees as self‐portraits, conveying boredom, anger, loneliness, or rebellion.

Highlights That Resonate

• The Entry Shed ("My Drawing Room"): A wooden shack at the start of the exhibition recreates Nara’s creative sanctuary - with scattered sketches, empty beer cans, and a playlist of 1960s–70s folk and punk classics streaming through. It immediately immerses you in the emotional soundtrack of his art.

• Record Sleeve Wall Installation: A full wall of vinyl record sleeves from Nara’s personal collection offers a literal exhibit of his early musical inspirations - a visual playlist of folk-rock and punk.

• Iconic Big-headed Figures: From early rough expressionistic work, like Dead Flower (1994) and Missing in Action (1999) - to later pared-back compositions, Nara’s figures stare back with emotional immediacy. These childlike characters, though cartoonish, embody complex emotions: defiance, melancholy, quiet rage or longing.

• Post‑2011 Fukushima Works: Artworks such as From the Bomb Shelter ('17) and Stop the Bombs ('19) mark Nara’s turn toward a quieter, more reflective aesthetic - charged by grief, hope, and pacifist conviction in response to the Tōhoku disaster.

  
  

Why It Matters

Crucially, the show is not overthought - it resists over-intellectualisation in favour of emotional honesty. Critics note how Nara’s best pieces feel like punk rock on canvas: raw, funny, angry, and irresistible. While some later large canvases feel muted or repetitive, the exhibition’s heart lies in its early energy and immediacy - where music and emotion collide in pure visual expression.

Visitor Info at a Glance

• Dates: 10 June – 31 August 2025

• Location: Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1

• Open: Tue–Fri 10 am–6 pm (extended until 8 pm Thu–Sat in August); Sat 10 am–8 pm; Sun 10 am–6 pm; closed Mondays except 18 & 25 Aug

• Tickets: £20 standard, concessions available, free for Southbank Centre members

Final Take

This is an extraordinary exhibition: energetic, intimate, often confrontational, and emotionally sharp. It’s the rare show that asks you to feel before you conceptualise - to listen to the hum of resistance, longing, childhood, and hope embedded in every brushstroke and figure. Yoshitomo Nara doesn’t merely show you his art; he invites you into his world, where music speaks louder than words, and innocence is laced with rebellion.

If you're in London this summer, don’t miss this.